


"And I Will Take You To The Anvil"

by historia_vitae_magistras



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Angst, Character Death (Kinda), F/M, Gen, Historical Hetalia, I read way to much poetry so ya get a pretentious ass title, Ludwig is a shadow of himself, Pining, PruAme, Redemption Arcs, Sex, Warning: War, american space program: the early years, and descriptions of postwar germany, barbituate abuse, because I listen to way to much franze ferdidnant, but nothing direct, child endangerment, gerame - Freeform, handjob, lots of nazism references, no on screen violence, nuclear anxiety, operation paperclip, post war occupation, scifi, the ugly side of the 1950s, there are a lot of brotherly feels, they do weird stuff in theatres, warning: drug abuse, warning: even my porn turns into political commentary RIP, warning: handies, warning: nazism, warning: sex, warning: too much fucking research went into this, who's going to suffer at the author's hands for what he's done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 15:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11316030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras
Summary: It’s 1947 and America makes Germany an offer he can’t refuse.





	"And I Will Take You To The Anvil"

 

* * *

 

_"Elder Prussia always gave to younger Germany._

_Without hesitation, Prussia built the nation state_

_and then faded away without so much as a cry of protest."_

—From’s Christopher Clark’s ‘Iron Kingdom’

* * *

 " _By ways remote, through distant water’s sped_  
_Brother, to thy makeshift grave I come_  
_That I may give you the last gifts of the dead_  
_And vainly parley with those god’s deaf and dumb_  
_Since that goddess, she who bestows and denies_  
_Has taken these, martyred brother, from my eyes_  
_But the gifts, the heirlooms of past years_  
_Are made sad things to grace your coffin shell_  
_Take them, all torn with my fears_  
_I wish you peace as I bid you farewell._

-From Gaius Valerius Catullus’ 'Ode To a Deathly Brother'

* * *

  
  
February 1947

Frankfurt Am Main

The theatre was empty.

The yellowed wall sconces washed the theatre in sickly, flickering light. Ludwig walked between them; stopped and stared at the halfway point between lights. Here the dark revealed more fantasy than the light did truth. He could still see the luxury that had been.

Once, the gilded crown work had reflected the wealth of the patrons here. Once, well-appointed businessmen and their wives would have sat in the plush seats. Once, they have been warm and well fed under their coats and furs. Once, smoke would have swirled through the air; blown from long cigarettes in their glinting, silver holders and well-oiled oak pipes.

Now there was only the acrid reek of the coal fires from below. His whole world is grey and polluted.

He stopped and watched as grey smog mixed with the dust of rubble that never quite settled. Spinning whorls of particles formed and rose with the heat. Warmth began to move through the clanking, groaning pipes overhead. Oh, the filth that passed for air here. A year ago, breathing in Frankfurt had been as impossible as breathing underwater. Inhaling would leave sludge from mouth to lung. The first weeks here, Ludwig thought he would never shake the feeling of still-wet concrete in his chest. Now, it was as if he’d never lived anywhere else. The weak sunlight and hazy air were a part of him now. Same as wildflowers on the breeze and wheat fields had been in Bavaria when was small.

But now there is only Frankfurt. He’d attempted to leave exactly once. He’d passed his valid papers to the soldier at the gate, and they'd turn him away, forced him back into the city. The sentry, a baby face young American, had waved on those behind him, though. The Americans turned their noses up at the smell and the air and the overcrowding. They turned their noses up at him. He figured that would allow him to move on.

But no, they’d turned him away at the checkpoint. He hadn’t been entirely forgotten, then. His people forgot him, sure, but the Allies remembered he existed on some level. Someone had recognized he still existed! The sun had come out for a moment. He had stopped shivering under his coat for just a beat. His heart banged away in his chest, and he could have kissed the sentry. The spike of joy had been utterly inappropriate, but the Allies remembered he was still here. Someone still knew he existed. But disappointment followed on its heels.

He had wanted to head south, where it was warmer and greener and safer. There, American troops still held the land. In Bavaria, there were fewer people. He’d hoped for Bavaria, where there were fewer bombs, fewer dead and fewer cities to remind him of his failure. But he was to live and die in Frankfurt.

Part of him had wanted to go and sit amongst the refugees. He wanted to freeze solid. But this time when he awoke, there wouldn't be his brother and the ruins of Stalingrad. There'd be nothing. Just black and permanent rest. They could bring his corpse brought out and parade in front of the Allies. At least there'd be an end. They could split him up. Grant his leg and ruined thigh to Ivan and his good shoulder to Francis.

Maybe they'd send his head to America, where'd they sent the contents of his best minds anyway. Maybe Amelia would do something decent with it. Scalp him and hang it from her horse like his old trashy dime store novels said she did. Maybe she'd build rockets and kill Ivan with his bones. It was as good an end as he could hope for, better than he deserved. And God, he deserved nothing.

Ludwig Beilschmidt might have still been Deutschland itself, but the soldiers still turned him away from the checkpoints and the ration stations. He went without the same way everyone who had failed Der Fragebogen had. He wasn’t a man, per say, the long weeks without eating wouldn’t kill him. But it did make him desperate and hollow and cold in a way he still didn’t quite comprehend.

He might not have been wholly a man, but he wanted clean air, a full belly, and a friendly ear the way anyone else did. The way all his children did. But, there was never enough here. Never enough food, never enough coal, never enough beds or clothes or men. Everyone was hungry, cold, wet, dirty and over-worked. All his people lived in squalor together, but it made more misery than heat and more foul smells than it did friendly faces.

Despite the war and the occupation, despite everything, the cinemas had opened again. During the war, the mid-week rerun of the weekend's movie and newsreel had been empty. Only the odd elderly couple or lone bachelor had hidden in the seats. Now they were desolate and empty. Few could afford to hand over the coal and the money for an evening of dry, safe, silence.

Silence. He hardly knows the word anymore. There is no silence in his streets or his room or his head. His streets still rumbled with the ever constant churning and upheaving of rubble. His women did their best to empty the cities of the destruction. As they went, they filled it with the scrape and grinding of stone and hammers. Then when that died down for the night there was the noise of the landlord's family. The rattle of their children coughing and the weak cry of the hungry never left the room in silence. Every sow often, on an odd night at strange hours, the Landlord's wife would fill the whole of the house with wailing. When the world did leave him in silence, he couldn't appreciate it. Even if he hardly spoke, there was no end to the chattering that forced through his teeth.

The silence of the film hall might have consumed him if it hadn’t been for the shuffle of his pace as he went. He doesn’t walk like a soldier anymore. There is nothing mechanized about him anymore. Not in the way he drags his feet. Not in the way he holds himself in the half-collapsed posture that made him as small as possible.

When he'd reached the safety of the far corner seat, Ludwig dropped into the velvet seat. The cushioning was thin and in 1938 he might have said something. But it was 1948, and Ludwig couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat without hitting his tailbone. It hurt, the way his bones would strike through his skin and clothes onto something hard. But everything had ground together and ached since ‘45. And before that, everyone had hurt more. At least The War was over. His children were thin and cold, and occupation made him feel helpless and weak. But God help him, it hurt less than the strength and fire had.

He sat at a strange angle. He frowned and cocked his hips left. He bit his lip and tilted right. He tried and failed to find a way to sit that didn’t make him wince. Sitting straight would hurt, hurt, hurt. God, He never sat anymore. He was always either awake and on his feet or curled up and asleep. Always guarded, and tense, even as he dreamt. He could feel it when he woke in the morning. Sitting was for reading and laughing and being warm. Sitting, reading, laughing and being warm. That was for families with fathers and mothers and brothers. And he’d only ever had one of those.

God, he was cold, always cold.

America’s weekly shipment of pity cigarettes meant he wasn't going to freeze to death. They meant he wouldn't be among the homeless that the police pried out from the alleyway corners every morning. He wouldn't be one of the bodies frozen and found amongst the rubble come spring. But it didn’t get him much better. A trade of cigarettes got him a cold room and a mattress damp with the human condensation of the other occupant. He crawled out of bed in the morning, and the other man who worked nights would crawl right back into the same sheets.

He'd hot-racked in 1941 during his only 3-week tour in the Kriegsmarine. By the time they'd made last port in Hamburg, he'd been filthy and caked with three weeks of machine oil, and sweat. The tool cuts on his hands had wept yellow pus, and he hadn't needed pomade to slick his hair back. He'd told himself that was as bad as the war was going to get. Now in the post-war world, hot-racking and filth were as good as life got.

He knew—goddamnit, he knew— he was lucky to have that much. He had a bed only because of the landlord's son. Fresh from a French prisoner of war camp,  the son had recognized him. The soldier boy’s face had lit up in a proud flash of perception before shame had swallowed it. He’d seen the process in his face as the soldier knew him first as Ludwig, the Vaterland. Then, Ludwig the face of a destroyed Deutschland it. Then, finally, Ludwig the bombed out shell of a world. He’d managed to shove cigarettes into greedy hands before realization hit. He didn't want the soldier boy to see that he was only Ludwig, the _nothing._

In return, they let him have what might have been the last bed in the city. It was a damp rack he shared with a stranger. But it was better than most had. He wasn't one of the poor Easterners sleeping in the streets. His brother's people lived in rags. They huddled together in the alleys. Fed their barrel fires with bits of scrap wood they could break off the odd shipping pallet. They slept in the corners they could find. They stuffed the newspapers the soldiers discarded between their clothes for warmth. The streets were oddly empty of stray animals where the homeless congregated. They had his accent, but not Gilbert's proud posture or his smirk or his ear-splitting, bellowing laugh.

They'd been entrusted to him the moment his brother had shoved him across the Elbe. But they died and froze and hurt the same way anyone else did. Oh, it hurt. It hurt like the loss of Gilbert himself. It hurt because their pulses were his own. It hurt because their pulses were Gilbert's too. But everything had hurt since ‘45. It all faded together now. His existence was a haze of hunger, exhaustion, rubble and cigarette smoke.

Cigarettes. Ludwig hadn’t liked them much before. Before, he'd been happy to shove his rations of them across the table at Gilbert. Gilbert was the one who smoked like a breath of fresh air might kill him. Now though? Now they were the only thing that stilled the tremors in his hand and the complaints in his belly.

He stood and rifled through his pockets for his remaining pack. He looked down at the hard seat and winced as he shed his coat. He folded it into a square and sat on it. This time, he didn’t hear his very bones hit the wood. He sighed, swallowed and put a cigarette to his lips. The match lit with a hiss that sounded like the faint sound of a man in pain. When the flame had grown and stabilized, he put flame to tobacco and inhaled. He held the smoke until he felt the nicotine race through him to steady his hands and ease the ache in his head. It was a rare indulgence. But here? Amongst what had been a place of leisure and ease? In this place and in only this place, it felt right. He felt right. 

God, smoking one of America’s pity cigarettes was desperate and decadent, the same way it had in the ‘20s. Then, Gilbert had rolled tobacco in 100 mark bills and calling it a cigarette. Those 100 marks had been useless to do anything but fall under Gilbert’s lighter. But smoking America’s pity cigarettes was somehow worse than smoking away money.

Cigarettes were better than cash. Ludwig paid his rent in cigarettes. He fed himself with cigarettes. He'd bought his coat with cigarettes. He'd bought his shoes with cigarettes. He pressed the extra pack or two he had every week into the hands of the few people who would raise their eyes to him.

Most of his citizens passed him in the street and didn't acknowledge Germany anymore. They were aware that something took up space there. The sensed that there was a man in front of them, but no one looked at Ludwig Beilschmidt anymore. No one knew his name. No one looked up at him, much less with anything like pride. He bribed others for conversation. But even a pack of cigarettes only earned him an occasional "Vielen Dank" that came with the appreciative nod. Most often, at his most lonely, he pressed them into the hands of those Easterners in the alleys. They'd look up at him with fearful eyes, and clasp his hands in theirs and kiss his cheeks until he blushed. There was one girl, in a coat almost the same shade as his brother's blue, he looked for especially. She'd ramble her thank yous with the others. Vielen Dank. Danke. Besten Dank. Tausend Dank.

They'd say it with the odd growl of Low Prussian. The same way Gilbert had when he was drunk. It was an accent that had been all his brother's. Ludwig never could form it into his mouth quite right. The moment warmed him through. But then the recipient would scuttle away, shoving them into inner pockets. He'd be cold again. And just as alone.

More often than not, the cigarettes he gave to the Eastern's ended up wasted. The police would pull those Easterners out of the alleys, frozen to death after a cold snap. And then his cigarettes would line the pockets of those same men who had kept the order during the war. The police force was smaller than it had been before. There weren't enough healthy young men to man it. There were never enough warm, male bodies to go around.

He was a young, whole man in a country full of women and children. But he may have as well been one of those craggy-faced beggars in the alley. No eyes passed over him with anything more than the dull recognition of an obstacle. His neighbors didn't look him in the eye. He'd had to address the ticket girl four times by name before she'd even realized he was there. Then twice more before she would take his money and coal for his ticket. His weekly trip to his exchange his cigarettes for coal always ended the same. He always split his ration between the landlord and the girl at the box office Cigarettes earned him a glance, but that was all the human reaction he could coax from anyone. They were the same people who had once worked themselves into a patriotic frenzy, and that was all the emotion he could muster from his people.

He didn't spend his days the way everyone else did. There were no long lines at the rationing or coal stations for him. No one press-ganged him into knocking together the scaffolding that replaced the rubble. Old men, women and children held nails between their teeth and hammers in their hands. But no one looked twice at him these days. He wandered his rubble city and pretended to be alive.

He was the shadow of a nation no one wanted to remember, but he was still the real spectre that haunted them. Ludwig shivered as warmth rolled down his skin. When he finally relaxed into the seat, the cigarette was burnt down to filter and ash. As the nicotine rushed through him and the lights dimmed he felt his abused muscles relax.

He was lean now. Sometimes he stopped and let the mangled remnants of his soul sink back into his body. He hated it every time. He hated being aware of his metabolism eating away at his musculature. Here, in the last row of the theatre, he felt the loss bite up from his thighs and calves as he tried to let the tension go. He took his leg in hand and tried to massage away the ache that had been there since Dresden. He rubbed at it. There was still scar tissue there, so raised and so raw he could feel it through the material of his pants.

He caught the edge of where Gilbert had stitched him together. His nails pulled the end of the burn scar up, and he gasped, bile flooding his throat. Three years, three years and the pain still arced through his leg like it had the first time. It shot through him like lightning forcing its way through the water, all consuming.

Pain like this wasn’t natural to beings like them, Gilbert had said. Upon the utterance of those words, Gilbert had been half mad with delirium. Konigsberg had still been burning, and it had shown in his war-wear body. The fever had screamed through him, and it had done it’s best to rob him of his sanity. But Gilbert had done his duty and sewn the tattered remnants of Ludwig together one more. He’d returned to the front, but before he went, he’d kissed a bottle of schnapps and toasted to Mary the Mother of God. He'd poured it over the wound, cackling like a madman as he slapped Ludwig’s shoulder.

But then his face had gone solemn. He’d placed his last suture in the largest of the gaping cracks in Ludwig’s scorched flesh. His face had pinched up in that odd, rare reverent way and he'd pressed his hand there.

“That’s the Frauenkirche, then.” He’d said.

And he’d been right. The Frauenkirche hadn't collapsed until days later. Gilbert had been long gone, back to Konigsburg in one last futile attempt to take back his city. Ludwig had been alone. Abandoned by his soldiers, his government and his brother. He'd longed for Gilbert and for Feliciano or even Roderick. But he'd been alone with nothing for companionship but the ruins of the Frauenkirche and his flesh.

And now, three years later, they remained in ruins, and so the wound stayed, as red and raw as the day the stitches had come out.

He sat, lips white and his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. His hands clamped over his thigh. He held it until the pulse roaring in his ears stopped sounding so much like church bells. He bit down on his tongue and tasted copper until his limbs once again felt more like flesh than fire.

He slumped over when it was gone and forced his breath into short huffs until it evened out. It was a discipline he still hadn't shaken from his army days. He might not have been a soldier anymore. But he wasn’t the sort of a man who deserved to be comfortable in khakis and loafers either.

His finger bones ground against his femur. What little lay between ached but in the tender way of healing flesh, not the fresh wound that he’d felt a moment before. It felt good sometimes, to be in pain. The first moment was the usual, horrible rush of panic and agony was as unwelcome as ever. But when his body rushed to knit his flesh together again? That reminded him he was still yet something. Even it was only a shadow.

He sighed away the last of the tension in his body and sank further into the warmth pouring over him. He sat still, let the rush of warm air dry his clothes. His shirt and sweater dried to form to his shoulders. It itched. Rough, poorly woven fabric got worse with constant wearing and vicious scrubbing in the basin. He hardly cared. Before Frankfurt, he'd hated the constant feel of grease and sweat just next to his skin. He hated how his hair stayed mostly back under a flat cap without pomade. But that had faded long ago.

He was warm. He was alive. He was more comfortable in that movie theatre seat than he was in bed. His chin bobbed and came to rest on his chest as he didn't so much as fall asleep but slid under the layers of his consciousness. He stayed there, vaguely aware of the flickering of the cinema lamps burning red on his closed eyelids, but mind closed off from the world and into the black.

Not so dark that he could dream, but deep enough that he could imagine he was horizontal. He could imagine the low light of the lamps was a banked fire of red coals and that Gilbert was curled up asleep in his bedroll just across the stones. He could almost smell Erbwurst and schnapps and hardtack and the damp of earth in spring. When he sighed, he didn't hear himself, but the even chuffing breath of untroubled sleep of two in tandem.

He pulled himself deeper into the black to the sound of his brother. The lamps darkened, but all he saw was black. The void he wanted, but the void he wouldn't shame Gilbert with. The black of peace, rest, end. End. End. End. He wanted it like air-

His eyelids flashed scarlet, white light flickering and streaming through. Fire. Dresden. The support beams of his Frauenkirche collapsing into the street like a clipped phoenix tail. There’s a woman’s voice, a Mother howling even as she was burnt black and stiff around her blackened, wailing child. The girl's coat was blue. The blue Gilbert’s was before they took his colours from him. Her scorched braids were just visible under a too-big Stahlhelm, and the boy who pried them apart is half dressed. The Mother’s voice rose, rose into the night like the singing of the bombs as they land. Then she was silent. She was silent, and her ashes were louder. Flesh made ash, bone made charcoal. She crumbles to nothing, and the grind of grit on the cobblestones is somehow louder than the girl's wailing. The bombs could burn everything, anything out of him. They could burn the will to live from him, burn anything, anything but a surrender—he awoke to a woman's face—anything but a surrender.

He jackknifed forward, tasting bile and blood and ash. His hand gripped his injured thigh. He brought his eyes up, and there is Fraulein Jones, his champion angel of death. Her face was twisted into a cruel smile. She shined like white gold in the light of the projector. She was too close. He met her eyes, black pinpricks in her metal face. Her face opened with a smile. Her smile like a wound that desperately needed to be stitched shut, a red and black slash against her face.

Her hand went to his shoulder, and her fingers were the talons of her eagle tearing into his skin. She laughed, and it is high and hellish like the whistling of the bombs just before they drop.  
  
“Three years, three years and your blood still runs black with ash.”

"Fraulein Jones— What?” He blinked and hit a wall of dizzying, blurred colour. The projector whirled angrily behind him, film hissing as it began to move and show the movie. The world shifted, blurred out of focus. He screwed his eyes shut until his vertigo passed. She repeated his name, and she said it the way it had sounded coming from his brother’s mouth for all those years. Lut-vig. Not Luhd-wig the way Kirkland screeched it did from his perch in Hamburg but properly. Lut-vig. Lut-vig. He shook his head and steadied himself on the armrests.

Her hand was gentle on his shoulder. He looked up at her. Her eyes were kind and spoke to something like bewilderment, but her smile was gentle, a turn of her mouth into the round of her cheek.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” He pulled away, and her hand fell limply to her side. Her face fell for only a moment, but her eyes hardened as they searched his face. They’re bottle blue in the sweet, full moon of her face. Then her smile was dazzling, and her hands were in the air, punctuating her words with excitement. The pink curve of her cheeks open and are as plump and full as those last peaches of the year.

  
“There you are! Sorry to wake you! I said, three years and you guys are finally rebuilding! Looking good!” Her German was old and odd somehow. It was the same way she had shouted it when they’d met in the skies over France in the last war. He rubbed his hand down his face and found his manners. He rose and her hand slipped from his shoulder. His bad leg nearly buckled but he stood, and she rose to meet him. They are the same height, but her white dress was too clean and too pristine for him to be anywhere near. The Priests don’t let the beggar near the altar cloth, after all.

He stepped to the side and drew himself up to his full height. His leg protested, but he pressed his hand to it and bowed low and stiffly, just like Gilbert had taught him to when he’d been a boy. His heels lifted from the floor and his calves twisted, but he just managed to keep his heels on the floor instead of clicking them together, Prussian style.

“My apologies. Fraulein Jone.” He kept his gaze low, as low as he was in her presence. Her dress is satiny in the way of polished marble, and she’s wearing a double string of pearls around her neck to match the ones in her ears. It was like watching a Doric Column come alive.

She smiled that same eager, confused smile at him and waved him off.

“I’ve told you how many times, Amelia is okay.”  
  
“Of course, Fraulein Jones.” He said, automatically.

“It doesn’t seem very fair that I should call you Ludwig and you not return the courtesy. It’s rather impolite.” She admonished lightly. There it was again, Lut-vig. Like his name was supposed to be said. He nearly sighed at the familiar sound.

“My deepest apologies, Frau— Amelia.”

Now her smile is wider and reaches her eyes, actually reaches her eyes. She is a handsome woman, with her straight, high eyebrows and wide eyes that spoke whole tomes of wisdom, glory and victory. But youth, so much youth, so little behind her and so much ahead.

“Sit down.” She said, and Lutz gestured his 'after you' down at the seat next to his. She smoothed the back of her skirt down underneath her, and her stiff crinoline flipped up around her thighs. For just a moment, Lutz can see the golden skin of the tops of her thighs. He spends the movie watching her more than he does the film. He desperately wants a cigarette. But Gilbert’s old rule of ‘it's rude to smoke in front of a lady that isn’t Erzse’ still stuck.

The movie began, once the newsreel was done warbling its same old story of rebuilding and redemption. Amelia took his hand a moment into it and laced her fingers through his. He instantly turned clammy. She reached over with her free hand and turned in the seat to face him.

“You look better.” She said. And her eyes sparkle.

“Things are going better.” He said. “You’ve been merciful. My people appreciate it immensely.”

“Do you appreciate it?”

He blinked. He… Does he enjoy losing the war? Does he enjoy being nothing? His loss. Her victory but god, their peace had been a relief. As soon as he’d invaded Russia, it had been over. There’d been no winning it. There'd been no winning it, but he missed his brother. He’s hungry. He hasn’t been warm since the day he had buried his brother. He hasn’t laughed since that February night since he had stolen enough scrap wood from the scaffolding at the Reichstag to knock together a makeshift coffin. A scrap wood coffin for a man who deserved whatever the Prussian version of the Great Pyramids were. But it was all he could do. It was all he had. On February 25th, 1947, they’d announced the murder of his brother, wherever he was. And Ludwig had… He’d put the nails into the coffin himself. He’d buried what he had left of his brother on the outskirts of Sanssouci. Two swords, a tanker’s uniform, the medals, the black and white flag, the flask. He’d wrapped them all up in the drop cloth he’d stolen with the wood and nailed them inside. It’d been a long night kneeling in the snow when his bad leg had collapsed under him.

He doesn’t remember most of it. Just the sky opening to drown him in the cold of more snow and his nails tearing away and bleeding into the snow until he had a hole. He’d left blood in the snow like Gilbert had at Stalingrad. He can’t put up a memorial. His blood will have to do. That Gilbert has blood who will miss him is the only memorial Lutz can give.

“I asked you if you appreciated it.”

He inhaled, and her grip on his hand tightened. There’s a small part of him that still whispered hate, that told him to do as Gilbert would and spit in Amelia’s lovely face. But Gilbert was gone, and the iron in Ludwig’s spine is gone with him, and the little girl in the Prussian blue coat had smiled an American smile at him this morning when he’d handed her his spare cigarettes, broad and trusting.

He nodded, thought of the girl in the blue coat. “Yes. You’ve been most merciful.”

“Would your brother appreciate it?” She smiled again, and this time it's rueful.

Gilbert would shove a bayonet in her at the mere suggestion. Gilbert would rain fire and destruction upon her heartland for what she’s done. But it had been Gilbert who had shoved him across the Elbe to her and her mercy. It had been Gilbert who had hugged him with all the strength he had left and sent him flying into the half frozen water. It had been Gilbert who had landed the slug into his shoulder when he’d dared look back.

“He’d hate you for it, but yes. He’d appreciate it for my sake.” He can’t bring himself to look at her now. Gilbert’s pride had died with him.

“Now what in your life, have you ever done to earn the devotion of a man like that.”

“Nothing.” He whispered. “I did nothing to deserve him. And everything to deserve this.” He’s done everything to deserve this punishment. All the punishment they could ever reap, he had sown himself.

Then she’s on his lap. His leg screamed, and he jolted. She held on by the frayed shoulder’s of his collar and lorded down over him.

“No. You’ve done nothing to deserve this. But you will.” One corner of her mouth lifted into a bemused, almost cocky smile. He opened his mouth to explain the confusion, to explain his humility and her shame in her presence. But she shoved his head back to look up at her. Her cheekbones were high and broad, but her face was lovely. Her hair was a curtain of bronze over his shoulder.

He gasped, and she leaned forward and caught his open mouth in her lips. She kissed him. Hard and with gnashing teeth and flicking tongue at first but then gently, even… sweetly as he gave way. He had never— Veneziano’s kisses had been like this, once, but he had never leaned in with such a soft body to give way to so much muscle. Her breasts rubbed against his chest, the points of her bra finding his pectorals even under his shirt and sweater.

His head spun. All the blood in his body split in half, rushing to between his legs and between his ears. She pulled away and flicked his nose. He just managed to turn his head before he coughed. She leaned back to appraise him, still holding him by his shoulders.

“You look better in blue than you ever did in that grey.” She said like he is a woman in one of the soldier's halls, trading his mouth and his hands and his orifices for the Fraulein bait of warmth and food.

“Thank you.” He said, in English. English had always made England easier to deal with if Gilbert was to be believed.

She looked pleased, and he swallowed a little of his fear. “Ah, you have been working on your English then.”

“Yes. I have been…” He trailed off, unsure of himself. Gilbert had always been better at English than he had. “I have been attempt to.”

“It’s ‘I’ve been attempting to.’ There’s the ending to verbs like that.”  
  
“Yes.” He nodded and repeated the correct phrase. “I’ve been attempting to.”

“Good,” She said. “You’re going to need it.” She said, and her hand returned to his shoulder. She picked at a little of the pilled wool there and looked sad.

“This was your brother’s colour isn’t it?”

“Ja,” He nodded, and his throat nearly closed with the bile that rose in his gorge with his sorrow.

When he’d lost enough weight, and his clothes no longer fit, Gilbert had shoved the remnants of his civilian wardrobe at him. The shame in his eyes could have drowned them both, but the sweater had fit. A little short, but embarrassingly just wide enough to suit his shoulders. He’d worn it since. Under his uniform at first for an extra layer, then over his only dress shirt as the years had dragged on.

Erzse had always said he looked handsome in blue, for all it was his brother’s colour. But anything he’d ever had to be proud of had washed away in the basin with the strong dye and the cheap soap. He’d only cleaned it the day before, but the greasy wool knit had pilled and thinned to near holes under his arms. He wanted to cover himself, button up his coat to his throat and hide his shame. But she was no Eve, and he was no Adam being thrown from paradise. He swallowed.

She drew her face closer to his and disengaged a hand from his shoulder. She unbuttoned his khakis and nudged his legs open with her knee. He was silent as she dragged his waistband down his ass and could only hiss as the air poured over his half-healed leg.

She could geld him to make European peace. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He nearly went to fight her off, almost pushed her off. But God, his will had died with Gilbert. She ran her hand the length of him— and oh, Christ that was not the motion of a woman about to take a blade to him. She pulled down, and he leaned into her. God, God. God. He was dizzy. All the blood fleeing his head for between his legs. He hadn’t been touched there since the war in Italy.

“Steady, now.” She whispered. “Steady.”

He moaned. The fire was burning in his bad thigh but mixing with something else, something better from his groin. Amelia's hands were warm, impossibly hot, impossibly soft for a woman who handled guns the way he did.

She thumbed the tip of him, and he very narrowly kept himself from thrusting into her hand. He stared up at her. She towered over him. In heels she was taller, in his lap, she was taller. She looked like one of his propaganda posters with her golden skin, flushed cheeks and sleek bronze hair. If she'd had one breast bared and a sword in hand, she would have been her own Columbia. She'd existed across that ocean with her privilege and her abundance and her strength, untouched by the madness of Europe. That madness that Gilbert had so tried to keep from him.

She stroked him, dug her nails in a little. He saw white and tasted blood. It had been so, so long. Amelia. Amelia. Her world was different. She'd thrown Arthur back into the sea not once, but twice. He'd remembered that not long after Gilbert had given him the empire, that the world had begun to fear her.

She had bled them of their strength merely by existing. That upstart bastard of Arthur's with her too-sharp smile and too-strong frame had sung her siren song. She'd sung of peace and bread and of prosperity, and all of Europe had heard her. Europes poor, Europe's well off, Europe's healthy, Europe's sick, Europe's oppressed and Europe's powerful had crowded the ports for decades and decades, all desperate for a place on a ship to that new world.

She'd bled them dry, left them vaguely ill and hollow on those days when it was particularly crowded in the port cities. From London, Dublin, Hamburg, Marseille, Varna, Bremen, Amsterdam and Constanta, they had flooded to New York. 30 million of them, over the years.

Europe's strength had abandoned them for her. And then when their war had spilt into her world, she had come for them with it. She had grown to womanhood with their strength compounded into their own. With bayonet and bomb in hand, the girl who famously hated the sea had crossed the Atlantic. She had arrived to kill the empires in 1919. Her own father's and then France's, Russia's, Austria's and Germany.

And then she had vanished, back across her sea. She'd destroyed the world during that first world war and left them to sort themselves out. And then when they'd sorted themselves out with war once more, she had come again in a warplane painted with her own leggy form on the side. She'd landed at Normandy and in Italy with her brothers and more bombs and bullets and men than anyone could produce. She'd learned war from the best. Gilbert himself had taught her all she knew during her revolution, but even he had been tossed on his ass with a bayonet through his belly at the Ardennes in the winter of '44.

She stroked him harder, faster and he moaned his response like the whores in the Berlin Cabarets before the depression. It sounds like everything wanton, undignified, and indulgent.

She growled at the sound. And brought her hand down. He nearly howled. The twist and pinch sent him writhing. She had his attention now, as if she hadn't before and she looked him dead in the eye. Her eyes are furious and sad.

“You’ve never deserved your brother. He has bled and fought for you since you were born. He died for you.” She hissed in his ear. "You’ve done nothing to deserve his sacrifice. You’ve done nothing to earn a goddamn thing you’ve been given.” She thumbed the tip of him and he nearly—

“I know.” He moaned, guilt fighting with the buzzing that threatened to take him over the edge.

“He bought you one last chance. One last chance to earn what he’s given you.”

He panted, and she twisted, and that was it, that was all he could take. She retreated it before anything he’d poured out touched her and he can only clamp one hand over his mouth and one over his exposed manhood. She took no mind, only tilted his head back and whispers to his throat.

"I'm going to remake you. Everything bad you've ever been, I burned out of you. Now it’s time to find out what's left. You are going to be what I am, and all of Europe will finally know lasting peace. I will take to take you to the anvil. You’re going to be better. You’re going to earn what Gilbert Beilschmidt gave you."

* * *

 

TO BE CONTINUED

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) Frankfurt Am Main: the HQ of the American sector in occupied Germany.  
> 2.) Gilbert's trashy dime-store novels: American-style westerns were very common in interwar Germany.  
> 3.) Der Fragebogen: a questionnaire all Germans had to fill out and pass to be considered for civic work. Failing often meant being, at least in theory, prosecuted for Nazism.  
> 4.) churning and upheaving of rubble: Germany was an utterly ruined country and rebuilding is still not wholly complete even 70 years later.  
> 5.) His children were thin and cold: The winters that followed the end of the war were particularly harsh and snowy and grown adults in occupied Germany were lucky to receive 60% of their prewar caloric intake.  
> 6.) pity cigarettes: American soldiers often kept German women as mistresses or lovers by providing them with cigarettes.  
> 7.) His brother's people: as the Soviet union had crashed west and the eastern front collapsed, millions of Germans from the Eastern (usually Prussian) provinces and fled West, causing overcrowding and displacement in cities already unable to shelter native inhabitants because of the destruction.  
> 8.) Cigarettes were better than cash: until the currency reform of 1948-1949, the economy of germany for all intents and purposes, used American cigarettes to purchase and barter for goods and services. Anything in a shop, or on the black market could be bought using Lucky Strikes.  
> 9.) Vielen Dank: A formal way of saying thank you in German.  
> 10.) in a country full of women: Post war Germany had a severe gender imbalance due to women surving the war as their men were killed on the front lines. They ended up taking over most factory, construction and rebuilting jobs.  
> 11.) Frauenkirche: The premier church of Dresden that originally survived the bombing but fell days later and wasn’t rebuilt until after German reunification.  
> 12.) Konigsburg: The Russians took Koenigsburg and the last  
> 13.) points of her bra: 1950s bullet bras. Sexy, right?  
> 14.) Fraulein bait: frau bait. Stockings, chocolate, food and any sort of luxury good that could be used to bribe a woman into bed with the overpaid and over sexed american soldiers.  
> 15.) his brother’s colour: prussian blue.  
> 16.) that not long after Gilbert had given him the empire: Prussia was mostly responsible for the unification of the various German speaking peoples into a single nation in 1871, just as America was finding its imperial footing.  
> 17.) all of Europe had heard her: Something like 30 million Europeans left Europe between 1850 and 1914.  
> arrived to kill the empires in 1919: America intervened in World War One to defend liberty and democracy and ended up accidentally toppling some of the oldest and largest empires in world history.  
> 18.) a warplane painted with her own leggy form: c’mon she’d look like a badass pinup on the side of one of her own warbirds.  
> 19.) She'd landed at Normandy and in Italy: the battles for France and Italy were meant to liberate but also to split German forces, easing the war against the Russians in the east. The eastern front was by far the deadliest theatre of the war.  
> 20.) bayonet through his belly at the Ardennes in '44: The Germans mounted their last offence on the Western Front against American troops in Belgium around Christmas of 1944 and got their asses handed to them after only a handful of days.  
> 21.) I can be found on my tumblr here: https://historia-vitae-magistras.tumblr.com/ I post hetalia, history and aesthetics.  
> 22.) Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. Kudos, comments, and criticism are my life blood and utterly loved. 
> 
> 23.) The cover up top is from the wonderous Katuman, a backbone of this hellfandom. 
> 
> Until next time, fair reader.


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